THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 21, 2016
97
United Nations." He tells us that he is
writing a novel; "Peacekeeping" closes
with the narrator on book tour---the
novel he had been writing in Haiti (not
identical to the one we have been read-
ing) has been published. The narrator
and his wife are living in Jérémie, a sleepy
coastal town a hundred and twenty-
five miles or so from Port-au-Prince. In
Jérémie, there are "more co n makers
than restaurants." But if the town is quiet
the political atmosphere is not.They are
renting their house from a famous Hai-
tian politician named Maxim Bayard, a
"legendary Sénateur"---cultured, impe-
rious, merciless, and corrupt. The narra-
tor shares with us one of the many sto-
ries that follow the Sénateur around like
a pack of moral creditors. Its veracity is
less important than its existence:
Every election day, the story went, the
Sénateur sent his goons around to the polling
stations to o er the poll workers a cold drink,
thanking them for their labors. Inside the ice
chest, on a bed o ice, there's nothing but human
ngers and bottles o Coke, all those ngers
stained with the indelible ink which identi es
a voting citizen---presumably someone who
had voted for the Sénateur's opponent. After
that, the poll workers often found their way
to slip a ballot or two the Sénateur's way.
Johel Célestin, a young, idealistic,
American-educated judge, is not intim-
idated by such tales.That, he says, is how
Maxim Bayard perpetuates his power:
"He's a talker." For years, whether thanks
to severed fingers or not, Bayard's sena-
torial seat has gone uncontested; Cél-
estin, already a bitter rival of Bayard's,
mounts a campaign to replace the Séna-
teur. Over the years, Bayard has quashed
plans to build a decent road out of
Jérémie.The old route to Port-au-Prince,
when passable, might take as long as
fifteen hours. Célestin makes a fast new
road the central promise of his political
campaign, and Berlinski makes it a cen-
tral tragicomic theme of his novel: some-
thing we take for granted can be frus-
tratingly di cult to achieve in a very
poor country like Haiti; its power to trans-
form impoverished lives is correspond-
ingly greater.
The struggle between these two joust-
ing politicos, between the iron-fisted re-
alist and the silver-tongued idealist, drives
the novel's plot. The narrator observes
everything, meets all of the novel's char-
acters at one moment or another, but is
palely anonymous, and often disappears
altogether as we inhabit the minds of
other characters, in standard third-per-
son narration. He plays no important in-
tervening role in the novel's local action.
That is left to another American, a po-
liceman from Florida named Terry White,
who has come to Haiti to assist the United
Nations police force. Terry is also some-
thing of an idealist, in a muscular, Re-
publican way. He got into law enforce-
ment to take "bad guys" o the streets,
and he'd like to do the same in Haiti. In
fact, he's really in Haiti because he and
his wife ran out of money in Florida, and
as a United Nations policeman he can
earn more than a hundred thousand dol-
lars a year. And Terry turns out to be less
idealistic than he seemed at first. He has
plenty of disdain for Haiti, along with
the usual robust American moralism:
"The way Terry saw it, poverty was like
a fast-running river sweeping every Hai-
tian and his responsibilities downstream.
The poverty of the nation excused every
personal fault." A likable braggart, a tol-
erable know-it-all, charming and aggres-
sive, he is the Unquiet American abroad,
and is brought to life on the page in vivid
gusts of narration and soliloquy. ("What
you gotta understand," "What liberals
don't understand" are favorite conversa-
tional openers.)
Terry gets himself attached, as a kind
of bodyguard, to Johel Célestin, whom
he admires, and whose life may be in
danger now that he is challenging the
Bayard monopoly. Alas, Terry also ad-
mires Nadia, Célestin's beautiful and pro-
vokingly reticent wife, a singer with a
Haitian band. Their a air, conducted
with little discretion in a tight-knit com-
munity, is the domestic counterpart of
the political struggle between Bayard
and Célestin. Inevitably, Célestin and
Terry White, once good friends and col-
leagues, clash over Terry's betrayal. And
then comes the earthquake, like a puri-
fying fire, to nullify all this busy human
activity.
T ' admire in Ber-
linski's book. As he demonstrated
in his first novel, "Fieldwork," which was
set in Thailand, he's a sharp collector of
stories, and he has an enjoyable way of
threading his narration with story: Ber-
linski knows how to keep leading us on,
even at the cost of sounding closer to
Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene
than a contemporary novelist should
want to. He's an intelligent builder.There
are bold set pieces, some magnificently
memorable scenes, and a drawer full of
minor characters, each one bouncy with
backstory.
One of those minor characters whose
short life is touchingly evoked and me-
morialized is named Toussaint Legrand,
a very poor, ill-educated, and undernour-
ished young man who begs his way
into Judge Célestin's political circle, and
who ends up working as his uno cial
c ampaign manager.Toussaint has almost
nothing, Berlinski writes, but for one ex-
traordinary asset: his optimism. "When
he told me he wanted to be an artist,"
the narrator says, "I think he chose the
word almost at random from a list of
grand words that to him were synony-
mous with hope. He would tell me later
that he wanted to be a preacher, a doc-
tor, a poet, an engineer. Step by step,
he went forward to an opaque future
that he was sure---absolutely, unshakably
sure---would one day be glorious." But
Toussaint loses his life in a Célestin pro-
test march (he is hit by a tear-gas can-
nister), and in a grimly gaudy dénoue-
ment his corpse is roughly handed around
by the pro-Célestin crowd, as if in death
the boy had become a political mascot:
"You couldn't really tell if he was alive or
dead, because someone in the crowd had
his head and others were holding on to
his feet." Not knowing what to do with
him, the crowd eventually dumps him
on a platform, where he is slumped in a
chair, with "a strange smile on his face,
like he had finally met a lady."
This is writing of a high order, and
Berlinski demonstrates a continuous
awareness of those heights---his con-
ventionalities are superior to many writers'
originalities. Still, "Peacekeeping," like
Berlinski's first novel, is a very traditional
book, in conception and form, and it un-
wittingly advertises the exploratory limits
of a certain kind of conventional realism.
Sometimes, for better but generally for
worse, Graham Greene seems to be a per-
sistent example for Berlinski. Essentially,
Terry White has the same job as Scobie,
the colonial policeman in "The Heart
of the Matter," and the same errancy---
torrid adultery far from home. Both
"Peacekeeping" and "The Heart of the
Matter" feature dramatic descriptions